Root Vegetable

This is my favorite way to eat mussels. It is how we cook them in Trieste and the surrounding area. Prepare this only when the mussels are super-fresh, and you will taste the sea in your mouth, made all velvety by the bread crumbs. I love dunking the crusty bread in the sauce. If there are any leftovers, remove the mussels from the shells and return them to the sauce; tomorrow you’ll have a great pasta-with-mussels dish.

The Mediterranean is rich in mussels, in particular in the rocky coastal regions. They are also abundant in the coastal regions of the United States. Cozze, or mussels, are a very popular dish in Italy, especially around Naples. It seems that just about every Italian American restaurant has some rendition of a mussels dish: alla Posillipo (spicy tomato sauce), alla marinara (mild fresh tomato sauce), and so on. Well, here is a spicy one. Mussels are not an expensive seafood and deliver a lot of flavor if fresh and still briny from the sea. Otherwise, save your San Marzano for another dish.

What makes this dish truly good is the old bread soaked in milk. Not only is it flavorful and mellow, but the traditions are steeped in preserving and respecting food: waste not, want not. It makes for a great vegetarian main course. With some old bread and whatever was growing in the garden, the Italian immigrants could make a delicious meal.

This shrimp dish is most extravagant if made with big, crunchy shrimp, but if you are price-conscious, medium-sized or even small shrimp will still be delicious. Keep in mind that the cooking time decreases as the size of the shrimp decreases. The amount of peperoncino you use to obtain the “Fra Diavolo,” or “Brother Devil,” is to your liking. Fra Diavolo sauce, originally made with lobster chunks still in the shell, is a creation of Italian immigrants in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century.

At our home, when we were newly arrived immigrants, for Sunday dinner it was either gnocchi or garganelli with sugo. The sugo, a rich sauce, was made of either chicken or cubed veal or pork—all second cuts of meat—which created a first-class sauce. The sugo does take two to three hours to make, so, if you have no time for the sugo and have a good piece of Gorgonzola, try this sauce. It will take no more than ten minutes once you have the gnocchi done.

Whenever stuffing anything, one may be tempted to overstuff. Well, the elegance in this dish is to stuff the calamari lightly. When you cook fish or meat, remember that it always tightens a bit, and if there is too much stuffing, it bursts out. So keep it light—follow the recipe.

This chicken dish is a signature Italian dish from Chicago. Just about every Italian restaurant in Chicago has some rendition of it. Traditionally made on Sundays, it is a whole chicken cut up in pieces with potatoes, peppers, peas, and lots of garlic and oregano. We have a similar chicken dish in our family, Grandma’s “chicken and potatoes.” At our house, it is everybody’s favorite, and we do make it on most Sundays.

This was one of the recipes that I took away from my great lunch with Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi of Torrisi Italian Specialties in New York’s Little Italy. Turkey is, of course, an all-American product that was brought back to Europe after the discovery of the New World, and it is still not big on tables in Italy. But in this recipe, traditional technique and New World bird combine to make a delicious hybrid. “Sous-vide,” French for “without air,” is a technique of cooking food sealed in a plastic bag. Such foods usually cook for a long time at a low temperature, about 140 degrees F. The integrity of the product is preserved, and, when vacuum-sealed, the food will last longer. To perform this technique properly, one needs a lot of expensive and cumbersome equipment. Some contemporary restaurant chefs use it, and with good results, but I certainly do not recommend it for home use.

Pasta with spring vegetables—or, for that matter, any vegetables—has always been a staple of Italian cuisine. But Sirio Maccioni, the renowned Italian restaurateur who has owned Le Cirque for decades, claims to be the one to baptize it primavera in 1974. Along with Romeo Salta, and the Giambelli brothers, Sirio was at the lead in bringing the fine Italian dining experience to New York. Sirio runs a restaurant that is French by name but serves pasta primavera.

One would think that meatloaf is very American, but its origins are actually in a German colonial dish of minced pork mixed with cornmeal. Italians serve it a lot as well, and in this rendition the cultures blend deliciously with the addition of a pestata, a paste of carrots, celery, and onions. Not only does the meatloaf taste delicious, but it is foolproof, moist every time. The leftovers reheat as if just cooked, and Italians love to serve it with roasted potato wedges.

“Straw and hay,” as the name of this pasta recipe translates, is a common dish in Italy, especially in northern Italy, Emilia-Romagna, the heart of fresh pasta making. It always includes a little prosciutto, the sauce is cream-based, and it needs lots of grated cheese. Here I added some chopped scallions for freshness, although the dish always has peas. It is best if made with fresh pasta, but dry fettuccine will still yield a perfectly delicious dish.

Italians eat a lot of lamb, especially in the spring and summer. I recall that on every major holiday I would always see the whole animal slowly turning on the spit, and it was indeed delicious. I particularly liked to nibble on the rib bones, and my second-favorite was part of the shoulder blade. But when there was no holiday, the slaughtered animals were butchered and sold and enjoyed as lamb shanks, chops, and stews. For this dish, either the boneless shoulder meat or boneless leg of lamb could be used, but the shoulder is more economical, and I am sure this cut is what the Italian immigrants used. In this slow cooking process, the flavors harmonize and the meat becomes fork-tender.

This is one of those one pot meals that bring spice and a lot of flavor to the table. It is a traditional method of cooking and combining ingredients, especially in southern Italy, and many restaurants have it on their menus, especially those in the Little Italys across America. This method of adding the cherry peppers, potatoes, and vinegar can be used with chicken or rabbit, too. The spice gives the dish its “capricious” name.

In Italy, wild fennel grows literally wild, all over the place, especially in the south of the peninsula. Duringmy travels across America, I also found it abundant as well, wild and cultivated, but the wild fennel grows especially aromatic in California. You can buy wild-fennel seeds to make this recipe, but you can just as well harvest them in the wild by picking the dried flower tops that harbor the fennel seeds in late summer. The anise-licorice flavor brings freshness to any meat when used as a rub.

Make sure the meat is patted dry before applying the rub. This rub is great to flavor roasted potatoes as well. Toss 2 or 3 tablespoons of it with cut-up potatoes in a roasting pan, and roast as usual.

Spaghetti aglio e olio is one of those basic recipes that just about every household in Italy, and every Italian American household, has made at one time or another. Searching for flavors of home, Italian immigrants could create a tasty dish with just pasta, olive oil, and flavorful garlic. The simplicity of these three ingredients and the technique used here is what makes it so good. Do not burn the garlic, and add pasta water to make it into a sauce—the secret is as simple as that. In my recipe, I have added some shredded basil, since I’ve found in my travels that the addition of basil to a garlic-and-oil sauce is quite common. I often add basil to recipes: when in season, it brings freshness and that pleasant garden bouquet to many dishes.

Radicchio belongs to the chicory family. Sweet and bitter at the same time, it is delicious in salads, braised alone, in risotto, and for making pasta sauces. On my recent trip to the Salinas Valley in California, I was astounded to see how radicchio prospered, and how much of it was being produced.

You might be familiar with this salad made with stale bread, but for some more texture and taste, try making it with taralli, often sold as pepper or fennel round bread biscuits at Italian specialty stores in the United States. Actually, taralli are small bread rounds, much in the style of bagels, which are baked and toasted to a crisp. It is a traditional food from Puglia, Calabria, and Basilicata. The story goes that the taralli were made specifically for the shepherds and workers to take to their fields. The taralli lasted and traveled well, and, once tossed with some condiments, they would revive and be delicious.

This sandwich was my grandfather’s favorite sandwich for merenda, the midmorning snack. My grandmother would use the prosciutto scraps with bits and pieces of fat, and when there was no prosciutto, she would use pancetta.

Just down Smallman Street from our Lidia’s restaurant, I have serious sandwich competition in Primanti’s, a Pittsburgh institution. I am charmed by their incredibly oversized warm capicola sandwich stuffed with French fries and coleslaw. I am not sure where in the U.S.A. this tradition of stuffing a sandwich with French fries became Italian, but the sandwich was so tall that I could not open my mouth wide enough to get my first bite. Primanti’s started as a sandwich pushcart, manned by Joe Primanti, in the Strip in the 1930s, selling sandwiches to truck drivers. One night, a trucker wanted to check if his load of frozen potatoes were good, so Joe Primanti cooked them up. Customers began asking for them, and to expedite the service they were added to the sandwich.